I work exclusively on Apple hardware. My daily workhorse is a Mac Studio (M4 chip and 128gb RAM for podcast production), paired with a Studio Display to make long hours easy on the eyes. When mobile, I'm on a MacBook Air (M2 chip), iWatch Ultra, and iPhone Pro.
I use Obsidian for my long form writing and note taking as it pairs wonderfully with Zotero for research projects and uses mark down files to future proof my work. Pandoc is my Swiss-army knife to convert files from one markup format into another.
Privacy
Perhaps it is a creeping presbyopia, in which life seemed to afford a greater privacy in the past. Perhaps it is an increasing awareness of the intrusive nature of advertising and data mining. Whatever the cause, I have become a strong privacy advocate and try, difficult though it is at times, to Restore Privacy. But with Privacy Guides it can be done.
Zen for browsing—Spaces bring genuine cognitive separation to the browser. Each Space cleanly isolates tabs, cookies, site data, and extensions by context (personal, banking, research, writing), making it far easier to think clearly and stay disciplined. Fast, minimal, and quietly opinionated—Zen gets out of the way and lets you focus.
Brave for Search
- DuckDuckGo and Startpage get honourable mentions
Signal for messaging
ProtonMail for email
- Infomaniak Email gets an honourable mention for those who don't need E2EE
ProtonVPN for VPN
- Mullvad VPN gets an honourable mention.
Proton Drive for file storage
- kDrive gets an honourable mention for those who don't need E2EE
- NextCloud also gets an honourable mention for those willing to manage their own service
Mastodon for social posting
- While I understand the pull of the world's biggest social network, Stop Using Facebook has some compelling arguments if you haven't seen them...
PixelFed for social imaging
PeerTube for video
Ghost for blogging
- Write.as gets an honourable mention
For those looking for a Google Docs / Office.com replacement and don't want to manage a NextCloud instance: Infomaniak's kSuite and CryptPad offer a great suite of tools.